I am in Toowoomba in South East Queensland to meet a fighter,
a woman who has battled foes real and internal for decades -
as part of the Australian Defence Force, on the cricket pitch,
on the brutal frontline of party politics
and, more recently, against the forces of reaction.
She has emerged standing tall and smiling.
It's the indefatigable Catherine McGregor.
Well, what a delight. Hello.
Who should I find but Catherine here!
Here we are. Hello. Nice to see you.
Nice to see you too. Where are we?
Lockyer Valley running down through there.
Beautiful, beautiful country.
Very special memories for me.
In my final year at school,
we did a cross country across to that mountain and back,
which was quite arduous.
But, yeah, it's a talismanic kind of place in Toowoomba.
(GASPS) Now, look at this beautiful vehicle.
I know. Brings back some memories.
Does it? Holy dooley.
This is an HD Holden. Yes.
1965. My first car.
Oh! And I saved up for it.
I think I paid $800.
Do you remember how to drive one?
That's really the most important question.
We'll find out. We will.
We'll find out, I think. In you get.
It's got seatbelts. The first one didn't.
Now, you're taking you're life in your hands, Julia.
I hope you know that. Oh, mate!
♪ Jump in my car
♪ I wanna take you home... ♪
I failed my driving test twice.
♪ Jump in my car... ♪
Couldn't do the reverse park thing.
Lets a lot of people down.
Lets a lot of girls down.
Catherine McGregor's life has been a series of dramatic changes.
As Malcolm, she served in the Australian Defence Force,
schemed in the backrooms of both the Labor and Liberal parties
and worked as a political commentator and speechwriter.
In 2012, she made the decision to transition to womanhood
to finally feel comfortable in her own skin.
Where has Kate been? Kate's been there all along.
Over there is Toowoomba Grammar School
where I took 11 wickets on that deck once.
It's a beautiful little ground.
I saw my first moving pictures there.
What did you see? Do you remember what it was?
Swiss Family Robinson. (LAUGHS)
This is it.
How long has it been since you've been inside this house?
Oh, goodness, a long time.
I've not been inside the house probably for 25 years.
OK.
Now, this... this used to be a veranda.
Oh!
And, although, you know what? Those tiles are... they were here.
Are they the same? Yep. Yep, they are.
But there was a little camper bed there
and when it got really hot in the Toowoomba summers
I'd sleep on that.
There would be these electrical storms
and we had a tin roof
and you could hear the rain pelting on the tin roof
and see the lightning through the louvres.
It was this sort of paradoxic feel of being safe
but having this tumultuous weather outside.
I really loved it. It was beautiful.
There was a piano over there.
Mum was rigorous about having us all learn music,
which I pushed back on 'cause only girls play piano.
Right.
Who was living here at the time?
My mum and my dad, an older brother and an older sister.
My older sister is 15 years older than I am.
My older brother, who's now deceased, was 13 years older.
Dad went on an active service to New Guinea when he was 21.
Mum's at home with one child, then another.
He was wounded, came back to Australia...
And then the two of you, the next two, came along.
We came along in the '50s as almost an afterthought.
I can remember my brother and I slept in one room
and the two girls were in that bedroom in there
and we would say the rosary as a family, with my mother.
No. True story.
In separate rooms? Yeah, yeah.
My mother and father would be calling out decades of the rosary
and we'd be responding through the house on this distributed network.
So this is your parents' room? This is my parents' room.
And Mum had a stand-alone cupboard there
and I used to ferret through it
because she had Dad's letters from when he was in the war.
And what was driving a five-year-old boy...
I was intrigued by the war
and when I knew that they were from New Guinea
and his medals were in there too
and I'd want to get out and put his medals on.
But Dad had a good job, my mum taught part-time until I was born,
so they had a dual income family.
Not everyone in the neighbourhood had a car.
If there was an emergency,
he would run families from the neighbourhood up to the hospital.
It was a real community. You know, we had a telephone.
Neighbours would say, "Oh, I'm getting a call from X,"
and they'd come over and field the call.
Were you a chatty family around dinner?
Yeah, we were.
What did you talk about?
Uh, politics a lot. Politics and global affairs.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy absolutely riveted me.
I wrote to Jackie and got a sort of proforma reply.
At what age? 1963. I was 7 years of age.
And I got back the mass card and this thing,
"Mrs Kennedy thanks you for your condolences," so...
It was a happy household? It sure was.
It was a happy family? Yeah, yeah, it was.
Mum was an incredibly tactile, loving person.
Very sentimental.
She was moved deeply by music. She was moved by poetry.
So your father died when you were eight.
Yep. How do you remember him?
He was tall, he was very olive skinned,
he was handsome.
The old man thought I could play cricket
and I remember him throwing balls at me
at a 44-gallon drum out in the backyard,
and he said to Mum, "This kid can play."
I made up my mind when I was young I was going to be a soldier
and I was determined I was going to play sport for Australia.
When do you start having doubts about your gender?
Really young.
I remember having what... these vaguely cross-gender identifications
in that I'd sometimes think about myself
and imagine myself as a girl.
And I was asked to be a girl in a school play in grade two
and I remember my mates razzed me terribly
but I was conflicted because I actually enjoyed it.
Not too long after, I experimented.
Mum was out one afternoon and I went into that room
and found some of her things and put them on
and she was aware that I'd done that
and I knew that it wasn't a good idea.
How did she catch you out?
Um, it's so prosaic and silly when you look back on it.
I thought I had been careful about covering my tracks
but you know how when little... men particularly
roll up their socks and shove them in their shoes
when they're going to wear them again.
So I rolled her stockings up and shoved them in her high heels shoes,
which is not what she did.
Oh, how funny.
And so she's come in and thought something is wrong with this picture
and she said, "Don't do that."
She really laid it on me, actually
and she said, you know, "Your father would be rolling in his grave.
"He'd be deeply ashamed of you."
You didn't decide to sort of cross over much later and she was gone.
Do you think you needed almost for your Mum to go?
I know that I needed that,
because I got diagnosed twice for gender dysphoria,
once in 1985,
when my feelings had reached a crescendo
and I saw the specialist in transgender medicine.
This is what's so brutal about their calculus
in that I was as trans as anyone else
but I think he thought my career wasn't expendable.
See, I was working for a pretty prestigious law firm
that was doing industrial work for the New South Wales Labor Party.
I'd been earmarked to go into politics.
And he said, "Do you realise all that'll go?"
You know, "It's not an option for you to do this."
So I put it off then but the day Mum...
I went to Mum's funeral in 1992
and I literally went back to that doctor the day after
and I said, "I reckon I'm ready. I can do it."
So that shows how deep the weight of expectations at not hurting her was.
What about your dad?
What do you think he would have made of all of this?
He... look, you know, people romanticise stuff
and all my siblings are saying,
"Oh, they'd have been fine, they'd have been proud of you."
He wouldn't. He was deeply, deeply disgusted by stuff like this.
He wouldn't have understood.
It would be asking too much for a man born in 1920 to understand.
Well, shall we go?
Shall we go to your school? OK.
What do you remember about your first primary school,
Our Lady of Lords?
Yeah. I did years 1, 2 and 3 there.
Mum often said after
that she thought I should have repeated grade three
because I was a shy kid, you know,
I'd struggled with illness in grade two.
The old man died at the end of grade three
and then I get shunted off here.
I should have probably been left there.
This is it.
And how many years were you here?
I was here from 1965 until the end of my schooling in '73.
So, you did it all practically? Just about, yeah.
On this floor I did grade seven, which was a year I really liked.
We studied Tom Sawyer.
I remember I was absolutely seduced by Tom Sawyer.
Were you excited to come here?
It was quite uprooting from mixed glasses
with girls and nuns and female teachers
to an all-male environment with brothers teaching.
It was scary.
You'd be sitting in the thing over there
having a natter to one of your mates
and a blackboard eraser would go past your ear whistling.
Coming to this school
happened within a month of the death of my father
and I think I went into my shell a bit.
Did your mum know that you were unhappy here?
Her view was if the kid fails at this or pulls out,
it'll be easier to pull out of the next thing
and she really drew a line
and made me just sort of show some resilience and stay.
How did it change?
Well, they picked a cricket team and...
Hello! How did I know that was coming?
And I was... I was precociously good for my age.
What strikes me being here is that you were a boy here.
You were a young man here.
From all reports, yes. Yeah. From all reports.
Is that a funny feeling? Yeah, it is a bit.
I have disconnected from that experience to some extent
and, you know, I had my final surgery in the last year
and that was more seismic a shift than I anticipated as well.
I thought it was just mechanical or mechanistic in a way,
but seeing this again, yeah, I went to a boy's school
and I was a boy and not worried about that overly
but it doesn't... it doesn't resonate with me in any way.
Well, I suppose, too, the dream was to be where you are now,
which is a trans woman.
I now look back on it and just think
I could have so done this 30, 40 years ago
and probably had a totally different life.
There were gifts that I would not have had had I transitioned young,
the most important being the marriage that I entered into
and loved and I love her still.
And, you know, I get a lot of flack from the trans community
and the LGBTQI community and elements of the feminist community
because I am privileged and, yes, I am.
I... you know I got to the age of 56 as a guy
and a successful guy with powerful networks
that are impossible to duplicate for a born woman,
much less a trans woman.
But I feel deep grief that I didn't transition younger.
I never knew what it was like.
I see these beautiful young women that I know,
some of them are models and things,
and you think I never had that bloom of female beauty to access.
Luckily you've got some fabulous friends that we can talk to
and we've got one here today, an old classmate.
Should we go and find John? You bet. Let's go find him.
Hello, Shorey. How are you going, Julia?
Who's this guy? Who's this guy? How are you champ?
I'm good thanks. Good to see you.
Aww. Good to see you mate. Really good.
Now, John and Catherine, you both went to school together.
What are some memories?
Memories of the young Malcolm, please, from you, John.
What do you remember about young Malcolm?
Keep it clean.
Well, he was... he was a soft, gentle...
Aww. ..boy.
But I always thought he was very smart
and he was very well dressed and well groomed.
Well dressed and well groomed.
So, how good a cricket player was Malcolm?
A very good cricket player.
Stood out from the rest of us and always looked a cricketer.
Oh, how does that mean?
Had own pads... Yes.
..own bat. Great.
Immaculate jumper, like the professionals had.
Were you surprised when Malcolm became Catherine?
Absolutely, yeah.
Somebody rang me up and said,
"You know Malcolm McGregor," and I went, "Yeah."
"You were just on Australian Story.
So I went and I watched the replay of the program
and I thought, "Oh, well, let's make contact.
"I'll send a message and see what happens."
And got a really good response
and we've been sort of corresponding since then.
But I was sort of thinking,
"How did you get through that part of your life?"
Like, A, at St Mary's,
then went to Duntroon with another guy from school.
And I said, I'm just glad you're still, um, breathing air
A, after the story and, B, um... I don't know.
I get a bit emotional. It's like...
Totally. Totally. Like, yeah, good on you.
You know, good on you for doing it.
And I'm glad you're still alive
and I wanted to just say g'day
and say our friendship meant something back in those days.
How do you think students would've reacted if they had known?
It just wasn't on the radar in those days.
Wouldn't have happened.
It never occurred to me that I could talk to these guys about it
or that I could talk to my family about it.
But we both sort of said we had a happy life here.
And I said, "Were you happy?" and you said, "Yeah, I was happy."
Yeah, look, my gender troubled me from time to time,
I lost my dad young.
Stuff happens in people's lives
but I consider, on balance, I was a richly blessed kid.
Well, we're going to take Catherine away now.
We're going to go to Duntroon.
Oh, wow!
That will be an interesting part of the story.
But, John, thank you so much. Great to be here. Good to see you.
Oh, mate, too good to see you.
Too good. What a hoot.
So here we are in Canberra at Duntroon.
How old were you when you first came here?
17. What kind of kid were you?
I was a sensitive kid.
I was incredibly homesick when I arrived here
and this place hit me like an absolute jolt.
But was it a dream to come here? Oh, god yeah. Yeah.
I'd thought about it since I was that high.
I was determined to come here.
Now, this is a room that pays tribute
to all of the graduates who have fallen on active service.
And, of course, as young recruits
if you had access to seeing this
you are looking at what is possibly your fate as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
You signed a contract of unlimited liability with the nation.
You could be sent somewhere and you could fight.
There were no women here when I came here.
It was an all-male institution.
It was kind of a cross between a military academy
and an English public boarding school.
It was the 1970s and it was the Vietnam War,
so it was an institution training officers for war.
Did you have doubts about your gender here?
Yes, I had moments where I doubted it
and thought about things
and I certainly new as I matured
if something came out about a trans woman,
for instance, Jan Morris's memoir was published
when I was a young cadet here,
and I can recall pretending I was reading the sport pages
and devouring this thing about this trans woman.
'Cause there's answers in there, isn't there?
Well, she was a soldier. Yeah, so... But, look, it wasn't unmanageable.
You know, I had cross gender identification
but I was very focused on being here.
I topped my class three out of the four years that I was here.
It's become fashionable for people who have criticised me
since I've transitioned
to go on that I was soft and, you know, I got waved through.
That's all bollocks.
I served on merit. I have an exceptional service record.
I'll table it if people want to doubt that.
Did drinking start here?
I got access to alcohol here
and here was where I kind of let my hair down.
It didn't immediately ruin me.
You know, I was the life of the party actually.
Once I had alcohol I started to react...
You know, it made me animated
and I was a naturally shy, introverted kid.
And a bit crazy brave. A bit crazy brave.
The guys nicknamed me Hanoi because I was bombed every night.
That was the nickname that they gave me.
Bar fights? Occasionally, yeah.
Got into a few stoushes. Won about 50/50.
I think there was an insecurity about my masculinity
that meant that I was too easily provoked.
If someone had a go at me I'd have a go back
and, yeah, so I got into the odd dust-up.
I can now see with hindsight
that I was... there were pathological elements to my drinking
by the time that I was ready to graduate.
You left the army abruptly. Why was that?
Abruptly is not quite right.
You can trace it two things, maybe partially my gender
and the army was a peacetime army.
We were all motivated,
every guy who came here wanted to go to Vietnam
or had joined the army
or certainly had entertained a military career when Vietnam was on.
I'm too young to have gone, all my cohort were too young.
It just seemed to me that it was a lacklustre way to get old,
you know, just serving in a peacetime army,
and so I got out and then I got into politics
and politics seduced me.
You were married here in the Duntroon Chapel.
Absolutely, yeah. One of the happiest days of my life...
Or THE happiest day of my life. Still?
Yeah, yeah. Really special, special day.
We were married there
and we sat in those chairs looking at this beautiful spring light
that was tumbling through
and both of us kind of thought it was an omen
of something really radiant, which was good.
Mmm.
And maybe it was because we're still together, you know, in our own way.
And you're still friends and...
We are. ..very much in each other's lives.
Yeah, so, yeah, certainly the light metaphor was not lost
and wasn't invalid by any means
but, yeah, it was... yeah, I get emotional thinking about it
because clearly she means an enormous amount to me still.
But, of course, it was a scene of a more emotional kind of scene
the day that I was formally diagnosed again.
So, tell me about that.
One of the first places you come to
when you decide you're going to transition
is here.
Mmm. And what do you think that's about?
There were two things. One was just physical proximity.
The hospital that I went to talk to a doctor is 50 yards that way
and we had a chat and they referred me,
they triaged me to a psychiatrist
and I walked in here bereft and I knelt in that pew and I prayed.
I don't know what I was praying for.
I think I was praying for peace
and I wanted... I wanted the feelings to go away.
And then I just... I actually lay there and sobbed
and I think I probably screamed.
I was really unravelling quite dramatically
and no-one heard me
and no-one intruded on me
but I lay there for some time.
And it sounds melodramatic but I was at fever pitch.
I was screeching with dysphoria,
which is a feeling almost
that the mind and the body are so torn asunder
that you just never have a waking moment again
where you're not thinking about your gender.
It was just hideous.
How does a doctor decide you're transgender?
Basically, they consider that you've got gender dysphoria
if for a period of consecutive two months
you are in such distress about your gender identity
that it's affecting your social function.
When I presented to the doctor over the road
I had not slept for four months, for all intents and purposes,
you know, terrible insomnia.
I'd gone from 85 kilos to 63 kilos in body mass.
I was in very serious distress
and I had an existing diagnosis from earlier
so that made it less complicated as well.
The repetitious thinking that you're in the wrong body,
that you should be functioning in the opposite gender,
is so consuming.
You've almost got no bandwidth to deal with even routine things.
So, you're anxious, you're depressed
and I formally sought medical treatment that day
because I was so suicidal.
But I'd told my wife about six weeks before that,
that I was experiencing gender dysphoria
and that's why I'd been seeing a shrink
for, like, 18 months or something.
I came out to her on that day
and, in fact, funnily enough came out to her
after I had been at a funeral on the other side of this chapel
and it made me very much focused on life, death
and our mutability as human beings
and I guess at some level I decided I didn't want to die
without having been me.
That's very powerful. I know.
Those of us who never have to question that
don't quite get what it is to be... feel so normal
but everyone else think it's...
And that level of urgency,
it's just impossible to convey that to people,
and I say to people who despise transgendered people
or mock us or ridicule us...
..spend a day in our skin with those feelings
and see how it changes you.
You know, we're not delusional, we're not insane.
It's very real.
I know hundreds of trans people. Our symptoms are identical.
The medical profession has now got to this point.
A few boofheads in the media think they know more about it than doctors
but the fact is that there is no satisfactory treatment
for gender dysphoria other than gender transition.
Mm. Was there relief?
Over time definitely.
Not that day. I just was fighting for survival.
The real relief came
when I gave myself permission to express my gender as I am.
That came further down the road.
All the medical evidence had stacked up
but in the final analysis I had to make a decision to risk everything.
And I knew I'd end my marriage by doing this.
I thought I might end my career
but that was... that doubt was assuaged quite quickly.
But there was still the whole question of turning up
and fronting out socially as a woman
after you've been a guy all your life and doing all that
and I... I lacked the courage to do it
and over time finally the pain got too great
and there is a saying in addiction, you know,
I got sick and tired of being sick and tired
and I just decided I couldn't fight it and I just let it go.
By then you were back in the army.
In what way were they supportive that might have surprised you?
The environment was pretty affirming and supportive
and there is, you know, the band of brothers kind of syndrome that...
So there's the world acceptance. What about friends and family?
It's fraught.
You know there are friends that I've lost over this journey.
There are people who never spoke to me again.
I have a brother who died estranged from me.
I have one sister to whom I no longer speak
and I have one sister who is very close to me.
Other friends have gone by the wayside
and, look, I can understand that.
It is a confronting thing to do and not everyone can handle it
and I can accept that that's... it's a two-way street.
You know, I can't demand acceptance from people.
Mm. Absolutely.
But I don't dally around now trying to explain it or argue it.
If I get push-back from people, I just move on.
I go where I'm wanted.
Is it becoming easier in a way?
Yeah, it has over time.
Every year gets easier
and the enduring through story has been the love of my wife -
no longer my wife, we're divorced, but my soul mate -
and without her I don't know that I could have done it
but she's never abandoned me
and she is the heroine of this story in so many ways, frankly.
Mm. But do you know what?
There's something missing in this story and I call it...
See? She's just done the movement of it.
I didn't even have to say the word.
Tell us about this team.
Well, I am playing in an Indo-Pakistani comp at the moment
with a whole bunch of young Pakistani expats.
I'm the only blonde transsexual in a team full of Pakistani lads
and they're a great bunch of guys.
I'm a transsexual, guys. Go easy.
Ooh, shot!
Whoa-ho-ho!
Oh.
Not bad for a 61-year-old.
Oh, not bad for a 61-year-old, I must say.
That would have been a six, surely.
Has cricket been a consolation?
Uh, great consolation.
The game was there when my father died.
I excelled at it young. I loved the game.
And I think what happened to me
in that first couple of years after Dad died
is that, without knowing it,
I actually escaped into a kind of transcendental state
when I batted.
I used to lose... It was one place that I was at peace.
Everything else would dissolve and disappear and I could tune out,
and then when I transitioned I went back to global cricket
and I was welcomed,
and I have never been trash-talked or rejected by cricket.
Now, you worked at quite a high level
for both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party.
There can't be many people who've done that.
I don't think any have done campaign consulting to both sides.
Looking back on it, Julia, I was a Labor person.
I believed in it. I probably still do to some extent.
I reacted very erratically when I first stopped drinking.
I underestimated the emotional impact
of recovery from alcohol and drug abuse
and I had a pretty short fuse
and I had a couple of big blood feuds,
which is not hard to do with the Labor Party,
and I kind of took my bat and ball and flipped them the bird
and went and worked for the Liberal Party.
When did you stop drinking?
I haven't had an alcoholic drink since 2 June, 1990.
And I was dying from it, to be perfectly honest.
That is amazing. I was a daily drunk.
I was a delirium tremens drinker.
I was in pretty dire straits
and I needed help to stop and I stopped then.
I have struggled with other substances from time to time
but basically I've been sober and clean for about 28 years.
You are an incredible speechwriter
and you famously wrote a speech that went viral
for the chief of the army at the time.
I will be ruthless in ridding the army
of people who cannot live up to it's values,
and I need everyone of you to support me in achieving this.
The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
Was that a speech that you'd been waiting 30 years to write?
No.
That speech, um... there's been a lot of misconceptions about that.
In fact, I think 'speech' dignifies it.
It is a 3-minute 49 political commercial on steroids.
It was just a quick YouTube.
That's how you see it? Yeah.
I don't consider it a speech.
I think it was more a polemic that I banged out.
I wrote it in about half an hour.
You were a finalist in Australian of the Year.
Yep.
When David Morrison won it, it made you angry. Are you still angry?
That's not true. Uh, I want to clarify what happened there.
I made some absolutely inappropriate remarks to a gay newspaper,
which I thought was placating the uproar in the gay community
about that decision,
but I wasn't angry.
I expected Morrison to win.
He was the Australian Capital Territory runner-up the year before
and I made some remarks, which I apologised for and I still regret.
I shouldn't have accepted the nomination in the first place
and I should have lost with greater grace.
I learnt a lot out of that.
What is this relief at finally being you like?
It's blissful. I didn't know what I was missing.
I didn't know what a burden I was carrying.
And there are days when it's almost too exquisite to express.
I've got to a point now where I think
I don't have to justify my agenda to anyone else
and I'm comfortable being who I am.
What have you learned about friendship?
Being trans is like a Rorschach test for mean dickheads and so...
(LAUGHS)
..some of the most unlikely people have been wonderful to me
with transition,
people that I thought better of have failed me and let me down,
but deep friendship is what makes the world go round.
You know, the love and connection with another human being,
that's the stuff you can't replicate.
If you had yourself in front of yourself now...
My younger self? Your 14-year-old...
And I know it's a question gets asked a lot, I understand that,
but for you in particular because it was a young boy...
Yep. ..what would you say to him?
I'd say, "Transition as soon as you can."
Mmm.
And don't doubt it because if you're trans, it won't go away.
Guarantee it won't go away.
If you are authentic and live fully as yourself
then the world will take or leave you.
But those who are really comfortable in themselves
will be comfortable with you.
Well, Catherine it's been wonderful getting to know you
over the last two days,
and to see all the places that you grew up.
Being on the road with you has been a lot of fun.
It's been soothing and loving and wonderful.
It's been a real odyssey.
If I get killed on national television, it's down to you.
Ooh. It's very powerful.
(LAUGHS)
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Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation